Search form

Search

Follow Us

Blog Bio

Dorothy Baker's Blog

About this blog

In Focus is Comcast Spotlight’s blog dedicated to addressing the issues that impact your business and clients. It’s a forum to hear and share different perspectives on topics including interactive television, industry research and trends, how to reach your customers, upcoming programming highlights and other industry news.

Using Social TV Data to Help You Reach Your Target Customers

Primary tabs

New research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that, as of May 2013, almost three quarters of online adults use social networking sites. The figure has major implications not only when broken down to show that social media is now established component of internet usage for older adults as well as young (43% of the 65+ set use social networking sites), but when compared to just six months prior in December 2012, when penetration was at only 67%. The bottom line? Social media usage has neither plateaued nor is it going away: it continues to grow, among all segments of American society.

Through our forerunning social TV measurement resource, Comcast Spotlight can harness the impact of this data and break it down to hone in on actionable and instructive advertising takeaways. Because the majority of Comcast subscribers use social media and are 10% more likely than the national average to use it on a daily basis*, we can be confident that our social TV data is indicative of our customers’ TV and brand preferences and habits. Through analysis of aggregated collections of hashtags, network and program mentions, and TV-related key words, we deduce social media users’ affinity for different brands, as well as TV genres, networks, and programs. By grouping users into buckets based on indicators in their social media patterns, our resource generates a database of potential ad targets. “Fitness enthusiasts,” “cat owners” and “ hardcore gamers” all have distinct TV and brand preferences – social media analysis allows us to gauge those preferences based on the users’ collective declarations and make more informed ad targeting decisions.

The news that social networks now reach 72% of Americans, in conjunction with our own capability to identify the TV and brand preferences of groups of social media users, means a more robust understanding of the impact social media has on TV consumption. As social media usage continues to grow, so will our capacity to use that data to better comprehend the consumer. We’re eager to pass that understanding along to our advertisers!